Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 10/11/08
Label: Polyvinyl

Listening to Of Montreal's ninth album, "Skeletal Lamping", you realise just how formulaic and staid 99.9% of pop albums are. Not for Kevin Barnes' kaleidoscopic electro-pop troupe 11 or so tracks neatly indexed and sequenced so as to ensure even the laziest of listeners is still at least half tuned in come track six. "Skeletal Lamping" flows, to put it in the psycho-dynamic lexicon beloved of Barnes, not a little unlike the stream of consciousness flows directly from the ego; unrelenting, ever shape-shifting and crammed with stylistic volte face and the briefest of musical skits.

At points it's sheer verve and barrage of ideas will leave you breathless. But does such a dense and cerebral listen mean "Skeletal Lamping" is not pop record? Quite the contrary. This is hyper-pop. Pop twisted and elasticised to snapping point. Pop pounded and remoulded like technicolour plasticine. There's a lot to take in here: synth-lite on "Plastis Wafers", lithe freak funk on "St. Exquisite's Confessions", Scissor Sisters shaming shimmery disco on "Id Engager" and "Triphallus, To Puntutel", alongside an assortment of deranged, syrupy R&B grooves. Think Prince scoring a West End musical for an ADHD wracked boyband and you're only part way there.

But not just any old boyband - a highly sexed one. If 2007's "Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer?" was the break-up album, "Skeletal Lamping" is Barnes back out on the town and bonking anything that moves; its myriad twists and turns giving the singer free reign to slip in and out of characters (quite literally), to role play (in every sense) and to effectively probe (sorry) each and every corner of his fractured fantasies - playing his inner black she-male on "Wicked Wisdom", the prissy rent boy on "And I've Seen A Bloody Shadow" or the indie lothario on "An Eluardian Instance". Occasionally it's sickly. But more often than not it's laugh-out-loud funny too. Self psycho-analysis never sounded so much fun!

But "Skeletal Lamping"'s audacious complexity makes it an exhausting listen. And at 15 tracks, most housing three or more mini tracks, proceedings do drag on a little. Furthermore the tinny synths and rigid drum programming grate and suffice to say if the lurid contents of a preening indie boy's sex-crazed black book aren't your bag, you might not get past track two. Actually make that track one. For the rest of us though, there is much to enjoy on this consistently rewarding album; brazen, bonkers and really quite brilliant.

    by Jim Brackpool